5 guides to success with OpenStack

About the author

Jason Baker - Jason is passionate about using technology to make the world more open, from software development to bringing sunlight to local governments. He is particularly interested in data visualization/analysis, DIY/maker culture, simulations/modeling, geospatial technologies, and cloud computing, especially OpenStack. Follow him on Twitter or Google+.

The best 5 OpenStack guides you might have missed

Interested in building an open source cloud using the latest and greatest that OpenStack has to offer? You're not alone. We've collected some of the best howtos, guides, tutorials, and tips published over the past month into this handy collection. Take a look, get ready to learn, and when you get stuck, remember that the official documentation for OpenStack is your friend, too.

This month, we look at running OpenStack on FreeBSD, testing out OpenStack's newest incubated project, building an elastic Wordpress installation, and more.

First up, some advice for anyone who has ever submitted a patch to OpenStack and had it fail due to an unknown gate issue. Matthew Treinish walks us through some of the steps he took to solve just this issue in his post on triaging and classifying a gate failure. Remember, logs are your friend, but it's important to be looking in the right places and to understand what you're reading.

OpenStack is all about Linux, right? Yes, but why not give it a go on another free *nix system and take a look at how it performs under FreeBSD. The folks at Aptira have written a guide to OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) on FreeBSD with ZFS. It's not for the faint of heart, but if you follow the directions carefully, you should be able to replicate their experience.

Next up, Julien Danjou teaches us how to fix a minor annoyance that helps give credit where credit is due. Since OpenStack hosts its own repositories and simply mirrors them to GitHub, you don't get "credit" in your GitHub contribution history for accepted patches. Well, until now. Use this quick script to associate your GitHub account with the OpenStack repos to have GitHub recognize your contributions.

The real power of OpenStack is in its ability to deploy elastically, rising to the occasion to meet spikes in load and then gracefully returning resources to the system when they are no longer needed. Heat, the OpenStack orchestration tool, provides the ability to handle this easily. In this tutorial, learn about Heat using a simple example of an auto-scaling Wordpress installation which will allocate additional resources as needed.

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About the author

Jason Baker - Jason is passionate about using technology to make the world more open, from software development to bringing sunlight to local governments. He is particularly interested in data visualization/analysis, DIY/maker culture, simulations/modeling, geospatial technologies, and cloud computing, especially OpenStack. Follow him on Twitter or Google+.

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